Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven? isn’t really a gospel album. “I feel it’s more of a spiritual record,” Tyler Childers says. “Growing up in church I was scared to death of going to hell. But a lot of it shaped me for the better, too. Getting through that and finding the truth and beauty, the things that you should think about, and expelling all the damaging parts, has been something I’ve thought about my whole life.”
The three-record album explores this theme through a collection of eight songs (each recorded in three different ways for twenty-four tracks total) that are both joyful and profound.
The original songs on Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven?, his fifth studio album, are among his best. The title track uses rural sensibility to imagine an inclusive heaven and is inspired not only by Childers’ thoughts on how he’d want his own dogs with him but also a passage in The Mahabharata, an ancient Indian epic that has been central to Childers’ spiritual life since he was a young man. “Purgatory”, about a man who fears for his soul asking a girlfriend to pray for him, is a familiar one to Childers’ fans, but he and the band say this is the version they always wanted to record. “We finally found our way of playing it,” Childers says. “Way of the Triune God” is a testament to the power of sobriety and an intricate display of picking and singing that will lead listeners to sway in place and want to praise the music itself with its Holiness-infused piano, head-nodding tempo, and irresistible riff. “The Heart You’ve Been Tendin’” meditates on Childers’ experiences with psychedelics and how in the end all we have is the love we’ve cultivated. Led by percussion, it’s Childers at his calmest yet most passionate vocals, backed by the band at the height of its game as the players luxuriate in the easy-as-Sunday-morning tempo that builds to an epic scale by song’s end. There are also the traditional tunes “Two Coats” and “Jubilee”, both such fixtures in the religious and old-time canon that Childers felt they had to be included and reimagined here, as well as the classic gospel tune “Old Country Church”, that opens the album. On the surface the song is a slice of nostalgia, looking back to simpler days when everything was better because everyone went to church together. In the context of this album it can also be taken as a lament for times when people of faith leaned more on love than judgement. It’s the first song Childers ever learned to play on guitar, when he was five years old. All of these are tied together by the aforementioned “Angel Band”.